Free Republic

Thanks to the fiscal-cliff deal and the Obamacare tax, we now have a tax code that is more “progressive” than at any time since Jimmy Carter was president. It will be interesting to see what long-term effect that has on household-income trends. The results may prove counterintuitive. Tax increases on high-income people may be redistributive, but not always in the way intended. That is because we pay taxes individually in the short term, but in the long term we pay taxes collectively: Individuals and firms pass on tax costs to employers and consumers to whatever extent they can, just like...

Al Gore, the man who first introduced the idea of blaming “the wealthiest one percent” for all of America’s ills, is continuing to embarrass himself in the sale of his low-rated Current TV channel to the Al Jazeera. First, we learned that Current’s management believed that the favorite news channel of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists is closer to its own viewpoints than conservative media mogul Glenn Beck; now comes news that the former Democratic presidential candidate was insistent that the sale to the Qatari channel be completed before December 31. That date was important to Gore because he was trying to...

While Washington pols pose and posture on whether to raise taxes next year, American businesses are busy taking action to avoid the hit their shareholders are likely to take come January. It's an old lesson that liberals never seem to learn. No matter how clever the tax hikers think they are, those who stand to be hurt by higher taxes usually figure out a way to protect themselves. The Obama administration hopes to raise more revenue by allowing the top tax rate to rise to 39 percent (or 43.4 percent if you include the new tax to pay for Obamacare)...

In an interview with Fox News host Bill O´Reilly last year, President Obama claimed he "didn´t raise taxes once." O´Reilly didn´t challenge the claim, and other reporters repeated it as fact. But it was completely false. By the time he went on O´Reilly´s show, Obama had signed more than 20 tax hikes into law with a combined 10-year price tag of more than $500 billion. However, since most of these taxes targeted relatively small and unpopular groups — smokers, tanning salons, insurance companies, the rich — few seemed to notice. Indeed, a review of the tax hikes Obama has enacted...

To best understand this spending aspect of the current budget negotiations in Washington, we must answer one crucial question: how much taxation on the top income-earners would be required to fully fund the present level of government spending? To do so, we must first make the unreasonable assumption that the rich will not respond to confiscatory tax rates and hide money from being taxed. This is unreasonable because no scheme of taxation since WW2 has been able to capture more than 21% of GDP. With current spending levels around 23% of GDP, history suggests that no level of taxation we...

An American appetite for tax hikes gives President Barack Obama leverage in fiscal cliff negotiations.A new POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Poll finds that 60 percent of respondents support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year and 64 percent want to raise taxes on large corporations.

Democrats like to shout that “the Richest Americans” must share in the sacrifice. It’s recently become the principal mantra of Barack Obama: that all this is going to hurt, a lot, and “the richest Americans” can best afford it, so they must share in the suffering. Some rich Americans, every so often, even admit that it’s true. From Rob Lowe in 1988 famously shouting back to George H.W. Bush “I don’t NEED your help!” to Warren Buffet today, rich people occasionally say that, yes, they can afford to suffer a larger tax bite more easily than can the rest of...

But the sources say the new decision is driven by pragmatism: The president and his team just wrapped up the most expensive campaign in history — with costs topping $1 billion — and they’ve determined that their donors are simply tapped out. The cost of an Inauguration can run into the tens of millions. Obama spent $47 million in 2009. And raising that in a matter of six weeks is too difficult without throwing open the flood gates, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The inaugural fundraising team will be screening each corporate donation. Those determined to...

If someone had told me as a kid in Louisiana that my husband and I would have a combined income of $250,000 a year in our late twenties, I would have been pie-eyed. It sounds like a crazy amount of money. But after taking into account taxes, debt and living expenses in New York City, we’re actually finding it difficult to meet our financial goals. Why Our Taxes Are Nearly Unmanageable Last year, we paid $100,000 in taxes, which is almost exactly 40 percent of what we make. Even though we also paid $22,000 in student loan payments (we have...

With radical bonehead Ed Asner narrating, great This crap will make you sick: manipulative indoctrination propaganda -it looks like something you'd see out of Pyongyang- that will inevitably be shown in a classroom full of impressionable, young children, and at taxpayer expense (!) Maybe somebody should tell these Obammunist losers that top earners in the Golden State are already slated to be paying over half their income in taxes next year- but since when do we ever we allow ourselves to be topped by France, eh libs? [YouTube] Update: Below summary replaces original video -which portrayed 'the rich' urinating on the poor-  since the California...

Amid all the political and media hoopla about the "fiscal cliff" crisis, there are a few facts that are worth noting. First of all, despite all the melodrama about raising taxes on "the rich," even if that is done it will scarcely make a dent in the government's financial problems. Raising the tax rates on everybody in the top two percent will not get enough additional tax revenue to run the government for ten days. And what will the government do to pay for the other 355 days in the year? All the political angst and moral melodrama about getting...

I value anybody working to make this country I love and honor, America, as great as it has been and so much greater than it is now. Senator Dick “Dimples” Durbin pulled the earnings gap out of the Democratic Party closet and pummeled hedge fund managers for making too much money in comparison to Navy SEALS. He feels there’s an immoral disparity between what this nation pays its warriors and what hedge fund managers earn in private industry. This proves a point: the Democratic Party leadership is composed of wealthy people saying “don’t do as I do; do as I...

The Bolsheviks, according to historians, robbed banks before they rose to power in Russia. That foreshadowed their economic policies. The Marxism they implemented once in power was just an extension of their armed robbery. Today's redistributionists in America don't have bank robbery in their pasts but they do accept organized theft as the norm of politics. They see all wealth belonging to the state automatically, which is why they count all tax cuts as "government spending" and why they feel entitled to hike up taxes whenever a self-inflicted "crisis" appears. Taxpayers didn't cause the "fiscal cliff" emergency; derelict pols did....

The days are ticking off to a January 1 fiscal implosion, and Republicans are trying to MacGyver a fiscal fix. Three days after the election, President Obama claimed the voters had given him a mandate to raise taxes on the rich. With Pew reporting that 58 percent of Americans feel the rich pay too little in taxes, it’s hard for Republicans to contradict the president. Unless Congress intervenes to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring, high earners will face significantly higher income taxes in 2013. For the top two brackets, the rate will rise to 36 percent (from 33...

Yet even with 10% of wage-earners generating  80% of Golden State income tax revenue,  middle class schmoes making $48,000+/yr   still get socked with 9.3% on top of their IRS bill... You have to wonder if any of the heavily-taxed hipsters out in Cali realize that Russia -you know, that country that used to simply lock-up capitalists and take their stuff- now has a pro-business national flat tax of just 13%, with NO state/local income taxes to speak-of... when some people in high-tax US states will soon be paying combined state/federal rates approaching 50%. To add insult to injury, the new California 'Prop 30'...

Consider this headline from a Reuters article in The Huffington Post: "Raising Taxes on Rich Won't Hurt Economic Growth, CBO Says." But the first paragraph refutes the headline: "Allowing income tax rates to rise for wealthy Americans would not hurt U.S. economic growth much (emphasis added) in 2013 ..." The CBO did not say, as the headline suggests, that raising taxes on the rich has no negative economic effect. In fact, the CBO actually said that extending the Bush-era rates for all would increase economic growth by 1.5 percent. If, however, the Bush era rates expired for the rich --...

Pelosi: Tax rates must go up on richBy SEUNG MIN KIM | 11/18/12 10:30 AM EST **SNIP** “The president made it very clear in his campaign that there is not enough -- there are not enough resources,” Pelosi said in an interview aired Sunday on ABC's “This Week. “Just to close loopholes is far too little money … If it's going to bring in revenue, the president has been very clear that the higher income people have to pay their fair share.”

In 2008, long before stress tests and Dodd-Frank, then-Senator Barack Obama excelled in the rich enclaves where much of New York’s financial class lives. Obama made staggering gains among one-percenters in the wealthiest areas of western Connecticut, where as many as one-quarter of adult males work in the financial sector. In New Canaan, where Brian Williams owns a home and the median income exceeds $175,000, Obama lost by just 6 points after Kerry lost by 22 points four years earlier. Nearby Greenwich, where you can find Mel Gibson, Regis, and Madoff's kids, voted for Obama by 8 points. ..................................................... The...

It’s no surprise that working couples in big cities are struggling to raise children while paying off mortgages and student debt. What is surprising is that they’re lumped in with the so-called “wealthy” if they jointly earn $250,000 a year. The "fiscal cliff" has added a new sense of urgency to the tax hikes that President Obama plans to impose on America’s wealthiest citizens. Obama starts the meter at $250,000, and it goes up from there. The tax increases on high-income earners would deliver about $42 billion in 2013. They would create a small 0.1 percent drag on GDP, according...

Obama: Americans voted for tax hikes on rich By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 5 hrs ago Claiming a mandate from his election romp over Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama announced on Friday that he had invited congressional leaders to the White House next week for talks on how to steer the battered economy away from a "fiscal cliff." Obama said he was open to compromise with Republicans—but that any final deal needed to raise taxes on the richest Americans. "This was a central question during the election," the president said in brief remarks in the East...